Friday, May 25, 2012

Happy International Geek Day/International Towel Day/Glorious 25th May

When I was little, we would eat biscuits with milk and watch Star Trek. My brother and I would act out scenes from The Wrath of Khan. He was always Kirk.

When I was older, I watched The Next Generation. I was told I couldn't like science fiction because I was a girl. I was told I couldn't be good at maths because I was a girl. My classmates gave out to me when I turned up for a school tour in a Star Trek: Generations jumper. They made no sense to me. I knew who I was.

When I was older still, I watched Deep Space Nine, VoyagerBuffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Roswell, Angel and dozens of others. It was a golden age of science fiction and fantasy on television. I joined my local Star Trek club, of which I am still a proud member. I started to write science fiction, to read it more. I discovered Douglas Adams, and would spend hours in bookshops looking at his books, deciding which ones to buy with birthday and holiday money. Every week I would go in, checking to see if any of my favourite authors had a new book out. I never found out when books were due to be published. I didn't want to know. I just wanted to go look at the books and see for myself. Even if I'd known what Douglas Adams was like with deadlines, I would still have looked. I was given a gift of eighty classic science fiction books, twenty of them by Isaac Asimov. It was an education.

When I was in college, I discovered that I could study science fiction. I spent my twenty-first birthday at a Stargate conference in England. It was one of the best weekends of my life. I wrote a thesis on feminism and science fiction, discovering Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, women who had written what I wanted to write. Women who spoke to me, writing back to them, silently thanking them for being there, for their voices. I entered a competition I'd entered a few times before. I found out I'd won while sitting in front of my laptop, writing another story. I wanted to psyche my mother out with the news, but I was too excited.

When I was in graduate school, I kept writing about science fiction. I found conferences where I could go and talk about and listen to things I wanted to know about my genre. I returned to Douglas Adams for my PhD and discovered that the old love of his work was still there. To this day, over eleven years after his death, I still look for the books with his name, with that same small sliver of hope that today there will be a new book by him. I started to game, and found myself around a table laden with dice and story sheets, laughing at something that no one else could understand, because they had not been there.

There's so much I can say. About how many of my oldest friends are geeks. About long conversations into early morning about anything and everything, wandering around the shows and books and films that have made up our cultural heritage. About how there is a joy in knowing that other people love what you love, and that you can argue about it and never fall out. About how you can get a hold of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels or Joss Whedon's television shows and films or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Terry Pratchett's Discworld and find new ways of looking at your world, answers to the questions you couldn't put into words, new questions that had been hovering around, trying to get your attention. About how you can flirt with a guy over the word 'shiny'. About how my friends seem determined to gift me more sonic screwdrivers than I could possibly hope to use, to my joy. About how sometimes when you fly, you fall. About how it is through suffering that we reach out to each other, that we come through it together and are truly one people. About how you can tell a joke and a truth in one sentence. And more, so very much more than that.

So instead I will just say this: I am a geek. I am proud to be a geek. I hold the glorious 25th of May sacred and will be looking for lilac after work. I am a frood who knows where her towel is. It's on the printer next to me.

Live long and prosper, my shiny friends.